At the Kulithalai station, she is packed into a train compartment by Muchami and Baskaran, as carefully as she packed her trunks. Radhai and her brothers kiss her, and Muchami smiles at her long and affectionately, a smile she returns rather more quickly, with a little puzzlement at his apparent sentimentality. He holds the children back from the platform and they wave until the train is out of sight.
ON THE TRAIN, Baskaran’s brother and cousin bury themselves in newspapers and lift their heads only to engage in heated debate with their compartment-mates on the subject of India ’s entry into the war on the British side: was independence worth such a sacrifice of lives and integrity?
Janaki is next to the window with Baskaran beside her so that no other man will sit next to her. Baskaran grubs in the left-hand pocket of his kurta and holds its contents out to her until she accepts. He boldly brushes her hand as she pulls it away.
It is a package, no bigger than her palm: slightly heavy, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. She tugs at the coarse bow. It comes loose, and the soft thick paper opens to reveal a box of worked silver in the shape of a parrot.
Seeing it stirs some dim memory in her that she can’t quite bring into focus. It’s so touching that he planned a gift; what a shame it’s so ugly. The bird looks vulgar and ill-intentioned. Perhaps parrots are not suited to being rendered in silver, she thinks.
“Do you like it?” he asks.
“It’s beautiful,” she responds.
He gestures. “Open it.”
She lifts off the lid, which fits onto the bottom half by means of a latticework border. Inside is a small sack and, inside the sack, glossy peppermints in pink and white stripes.
“Take one,” he urges, but she thinks they look too lovely to eat, and she feels so shy. She imagines playing palanguzhi, Kamalam’s favourite game, with him, using pink and white peppermints for tokens.
She hands back the bird-shaped box, indicating Baskaran should offer the mints around the compartment. He tries and is ignored by the others, who are shouting now, evenly divided on a number of related political topics. Finally, he takes a mint, presses it into her mouth and chucks her lightly under the chin. Taking another candy for himself, he sits back to enjoy her discomfort.
MUCHAMI FINISHES PUTTING AWAY THE BULLOCK and cart and comes through the courtyard toward the kitchen door, carrying Raghavan, who is nearly asleep. Sivakami is in the pantry, reading her Ramayana, only her forehead and hands visible above the book. The older children have scattered. Muchami calls out softly, “Amma?” then goes back around to pass through the back room, then the room under the stairs, into the main hall.
Sivakami lays a mat down in the main hall. Muchami deposits the little boy on it, and Raghavan rolls luxuriantly onto his side, already asleep.
Sivakami and Muchami take their separate paths, she through the kitchen, he through the other passage, out to the courtyard, where Muchami draws some water. He washes his feet, face, neck and hands, and takes a long drink.
“Everything went all right?” Sivakami asks from the small veranda at the back of the house.
“Oh, yes,” he says. “Janaki’s a good girl, very smart girl.”
“Yes,” Sivakami says. “They’re all good.”
“I will miss her more than the elder ones,” he says, a little apologetically, “and probably more than the younger ones, too.”
“Sure, who will practise Sanskrit with you?”
Muchami laughs. “She surpassed me so long ago, she has no use for this old man’s stuttering!” He looks serious again. “Amma… seeing her in-laws, I couldn’t help thinking again about how Vairum, what he said about how we warned off Goli. Ah, I felt so bad, all over again.”
Sivakami is silent: she had tried to talk to Vairum about that after the wedding was over, but he wouldn’t allow it. “What’s done is done, Muchami. Don’t torture yourself. I wouldn’t even have told you what Vairum said if you hadn’t asked.”
“I should have known.” Muchami hits his head with his fist. “Vairum is also so intelligent. I should have known he would anticipate whatever we could. I was just so concerned for Janaki.”
“Yes, yes.” Sivakami doesn’t see the point of talking about it. They can’t take it back and they’ll never do it again. “The point is, she’ll be fine there.”
“I think she will.” His face shines as he thinks of her, all dressed up, with her rich husband. “I think she’ll really do well.”
At the Pandiyoor station, the family’s bullock cart, magnificently decorated and drawn by a majestic and fatty black bull, awaits them. Gopalan, the family’s head servant, is driving. Before he mounts the cart, Baskaran pulls a small tin from the pocket of his kurta, inhales a few pinches of snuff from it, and sneezes. Janaki looks away, wishing she hadn’t seen. He mounts the cart and Gopalan twitches the reins against the bullock’s back.
Leaving the station, they cross a small commercial street and travel past the bus depot and a post office before turning into one of two streets that, intersecting at a T, make up the Brahmin quarter. Single Street, the top of the T, is composed of a row of houses facing the sides of two long houses on Double Street, including Baskaran’s family home. Double Street, the T’s stem, looks more like the Cholapatti Brahmin quarter, with two rows of houses facing each other. On both streets, the houses share walls with their neighbours, the red and white stripes of the verandas, as in Cholapatti, practically continuous. Double Street culminates in a Krishna temple, behind which stretches the Vaigai River.
Almost everyone on the street between the station and the Brahmin quarter recognizes the cart and puts palms together respectfully. Baskaran’s brother gives the expected reaction: sometimes he nods in acknowledgement; mostly he doesn’t react at all. Baskaran, though, puts his own palms together, offering namaskarams to labourers, merchants, a tailor, hardly conventional Brahmin behaviour. Suspicion inkles in Janaki’s breast: she hasn’t married a radical, has she?
Only one of Baskaran’s sisters is at home, the one who married locally. She squeals delightedly, a habit Janaki noticed when they met earlier. The two sisters-in-law are more-what? Reticent or decorous? Surly or proper? Janaki can’t read them. Vermilion water is swirled; songs sung. The bride and groom are instructed to step up onto the threshold with their right feet. Janaki, looking down, watches her own foot, hennaed in dots and lines, entering her real and forever home in unison with the wide, pale foot of the husband who brought her here.
Her mother-in-law has stood for the occasion and waits inside, Dhoraisamy tittering and bobbing beside her. Baskaran and Mrs. Baskaran prostrate themselves before the household elders.
Her sisters-in-law indicate that they will show Janaki around while her luggage is brought in, and Baskaran goes off to bathe. Janaki turns and, without thinking, blurts words of caution about her veena. She receives a look of pained hauteur from Gopalan in return-a servant of his calibre needs no such instruction. She cringes, but is also reassured.
The house is two or three times the size of the one she grew up in. The ground floor has not only a veranda and anteroom leading into the main hall from the street, but a front study that corresponds to the anteroom, with a desk on which are neatly arranged a blotter, pen and paperweights. Tidily labelled ledgers bound in red or brown leather line a rotating rosewood bookshelf beside it. After a peep into the study, Janaki is led back through the main hall and into a small extra room, lit by two windows that give onto yet another room. The windows have no panes, bars, or shutters, but they are a bit too high to see through, the bottom edge at the level of Janaki’s brow. Vasantha, the elder sister-in-law, explains in a low tone that this is the women’s room. It contains untidy piles of tatting and embroidery, magazines and novels, a harmonium and now her veena still within its jute wrappings. Swarna nods nervously and whispers, “We spend time here, you see-when we’re not doing everything else we have to do.” Janaki wonders why they are acting as if this is a secret.